James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (19 page)

His instinct was to do something real, and something local. And real life in his neighborhood had been changed forever during the third season of
The Sopranos
when two fully-loaded jetliners smashed into the World Trade Center, not two miles from his and Marcy’s apartment in the West Village.

Susan Aston remembers coming to James’s apartment after the planes hit. Power was out in places downtown, but Jim had electricity, and she, her niece Britney Houlihan, Jim, and Marcy hunkered down in front of the television after the towers fell and the tip of lower Manhattan went black with smoke and dust. Michael was still a toddler. They were joined later that day by Marcy’s masseuse, Bethany Parish, and her husband Anthony; they lived in Battery Park City, right next to the towers, and Battery Park was being forcibly evacuated.

Like a lot of New Yorkers, they weren’t sure that the attacks had ended. They saw out their windows the bedraggled lines of people in scorched clothes and with soot-blackened faces as they walked north from Ground Zero, very quietly for the most part, trying to find a way home. The bridges and tunnels were closed and all the subway and commuter trains shut off; Susan’s then-husband, Mario Mendoza, had been upstate, and he’d parked his car north of Spuyten Duyvil and walked across the Henry Hudson Bridge into the city. Mario hitched rides or walked all the way down the island to join them in the Village that afternoon. They thought about getting the raft James had brought into the city from the Shore that summer. They could cross the river to Jersey, make their way quickly enough to friends’ houses. At least there they could be mobile.

“But if we got the raft,” James said, “we’d have to bring guns, too.” They might need some means of defense if there was another attack—but also, perhaps, to ward off stranded commuters anxious to get off the island themselves. Aston says that’s when she really started to freak out about what was happening.

They decided against making a dash across the river. Aston’s mom called from Texas and told her that the Pentagon had been hit and another airliner had been crashed by its passengers in Pennsylvania. And that was it. But no one who was in New York City that day will ever forget the way it felt.

After the cleanup got underway, James, Tony Sirico, Vincent Pastore, and Vincent Curatola went to Ground Zero to meet with firemen, police, construction workers, and other volunteers to boost morale. The actors were mobbed.

“We were supposed to meet the mayor [Rudy Giuliani], but he couldn’t make it, he got delayed, you know what it was like back then,” Tony Sirico remembers. “So we go in, they gave us all these masks to wear, to breathe. There was like hundreds of these guys out there, and it was unbelievable, just unbelievable, what those buildings had become … Just twisted, what all was in it, well, you’ve seen the pictures. Unbelievable. And the guys who were working there were so happy to see us, any break from searching through that mess of wreckage, thinking you’d find a body. Only, they found out, there weren’t many bodies.

“And at one point I took off my mask to light a cigarette, and
marone
,” Sirico continues. “I almost choked. These guys were breathing that stuff day after day.… It was amazing. And I think [our commitment to do something for people responding to the attacks] all started from that. You just had to do something. We all felt it.”

It’s true, they did. The day after 9/11, Steve Buscemi, who the previous spring had directed Sirico in the acclaimed “The Pine Barrens” episode, in which Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti get lost in the snow, had gone down to his old firehouse and volunteered. He spent a week clearing the rubble alongside his fellow firefighters.

Everything about those days became emotionally freighted for New Yorkers. At
The Sopranos,
they were careful to remove the brief glimpse of the towers you could catch in Tony’s side rearview mirror as he left the Lincoln Tunnel during the credits sequence. Time was divided between the days when the World Trade Center was there and the days when it wasn’t.

James told Susan that he felt ridiculous going to Ground Zero and just standing there in a mask, without really pitching in and helping, physically. But the overwhelming response of the working guys at Ground Zero, the way they so evidently loved the visit by Tony, Paulie, Big Pussy, and Johnny Sack, revealed another side of this celebrity thing. It didn’t have to be a fire hose aimed at you. It could be a spotlight you used to shine on other people.

Soon Gandolfini was going back to Jersey every fall for the annual OctoberWoman’s Breast Cancer Foundation fund-raising dinner, to help out his old classmate Donna Mancinelli in Park Ridge. The whole cast came out to Bergen County, signing autographs and posing for pictures. Jim spent the night afterward, no matter how long the banquet took, drinking beer and telling jokes with his high school buddies in basements and rec rooms in Park Ridge.

Jim insisted on only HBO cameras, no media. But when the financial crash came in 2008, the cancer fund-raising changed—no one was buying thousand-dollar dinner tickets anymore—and
The Sopranos
had ended. What hadn’t ended were the two wars sparked by the attack on the World Trade Center.

Those wars were still sending a steady stream of severely maimed and wounded soldiers back home. In 2006, Al Giordano, a former Marine and a veterans affairs activist, had helped found a nonprofit called the Wounded Warriors Project, designed to help returning soldiers adjust to civilian life. Part of the project was an annual summer event at Breezy Point, in Queens, where convalescent soldiers, including amputees, could get out in the sun, learn to use their prostheses, and do water sports—“like, learn to ski on one leg,” Sirico, a vet himself, says. He called to find out if there was anything he could do, and Giordano invited him down.

“I had to do it, I just had to,” Sirico says. “I mean, I play a tough guy, but these guys are the tough guys. After what they had done, I had to.” He told Gandolfini about the event. Soon James was in touch with Giordano. Every July the Wounded Warriors mount a parade from Staten Island across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and down to Breezy Point (the cops shut down the bridge and river traffic for the day). It’s a long march of wounded soldiers, some more ambulatory than others. Gandolfini became a regular.

“Jim shows up in a red Cadillac convertible with a quadruple amputee, Eighty-second Airborne, his wife, daughter, and his mother-in-law in the backseat with him,” Giordano recalls. This was in 2012. “And he drives them the whole parade route, it takes like two hours, and then spends the day at the beach.… I meet a lot of celebrities in my job, and some want to do this just for the cameras. But that was not Jim Gandolfini.”

Gandolfini and Sirico toured military hospitals together, often with other actors from the show. They’d meet at Walter Reed hospital outside Washington, D.C., the Brooklyn Army Medical Center, and in rehab clinics around the Northeast, talking to large groups. Sirico remembers one Veterans Administration facility that had a rock-climbing wall, to help amputees regain a sense of mobility—many of them could climb to the top with just three, even two limbs. Gandolfini insisted on hooking up a belay harness and trying to climb in front of dozens of recovering soldiers.

“HBO woulda had a heart attack if they’d seen this,” Sirico recalls. “So Jimmy gets all hooked up, he’s like a really big guy then, and he climbs two, three, four handholds—and boom, flat on his ass! It brought down the house, I’m telling you.”

They journeyed out to the U.S. military’s chief burn center in San Antonio, always the most difficult place for a morale visit—soldiers with “half their face burned off, limbs burned off, in constant pain,” Sirico recalls. “The trick is, never lose eye contact. I’d grab their arm, you know, where they weren’t burned, touch them, let them know we care.” Jim was representing an expensive watch company, and he would pass out $5,000 watches to the wounded—he’d hint that they didn’t have to treat them like sentimental keepsakes if they needed the money.

All the soldiers knew who Tony Soprano was. DVDs of
The Sopranos
were popular items in Iraq and Afghanistan.

*   *   *

In 2006, HBO aired
Baghdad ER
, a documentary about life in a U.S. military trauma ward in Iraq, directed by Jon Alpert. The documentary was intense, heartbreaking, and profoundly honest, and it won a Peabody Award. Alpert wanted to do the obvious sequel, a documentary about soldiers returning and the work being done by Wounded Warriors. But HBO, perhaps understandably, thought however honorable the idea was, it was unlikely to draw an audience—eat-your-spinach TV is a euphemism here. Besides, the Pentagon had not liked
Baghdad ER
, and they decided to revoke the filmmaker’s access to Walter Reed hospital just as he was about to shoot there.

That was when Gandolfini got involved. Although he didn’t want to be on camera, an odd compromise evolved. The vets would come into New York City, to an empty stage set, and sit on a chair; Jim would sit off the dais, with the camera shooting over his shoulder, and interview them about their “Alive Day,” the day they were wounded but survived.

Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq
became the first project Gandolfini put before the public after
The Sopranos
ended. He interviewed ten wounded soldiers, many of them missing two or three limbs, some with severe head trauma or post-traumatic stress syndrome. You don’t hear much from Jim; occasionally you see him get up and hug the soldier when the interview is done. One of the subjects, former army first lieutenant Dawn Halfaker, a pretty redhead, had lost her right arm and shoulder to a rocket-propelled grenade. During their talk Halfaker wonders aloud whether her child, if she ever has one, could truly love her now. There’s a long pause.

Gandolfini waits, waits a little longer, then quietly asks, “What were you just thinking about?”

“The reality of, will I be able to raise a kid?” she answers. “I won’t be able to pick up my son or daughter with two arms.”

Jim was committing a kind of journalism, though probably not the sort he’d imagined when he was getting that Rutgers degree. And it was also a kind of reversal on the celebrity journalism Gandolfini hated—he, the celebrity, out of the lights, real tough guys onstage and bearing witness to the awfulness of violence. Gandolfini kept in touch with some of the soldiers over time. He asked Giordano to help him find ways to help out. He wanted a Wounded Warrior driver for when he was in Los Angeles, and Giordano found him a marine vet who had once driven for a general.

Wounded Warriors became part of his crew. He filmed a series of public service announcements for the project just before he died, to help with fund-raising. (Wounded Warriors has now grown from Giordano and his two buddies into an organization with 421 direct employees and an annual budget of $200 million.) Giordano says he’s not sure what to do with the PSAs now that Jim has died. But he remembers, when they were shooting the commercials and asked if he could do another take, Gandolfini replied, “Sure, this is way more important than the shit I usually do.”

One of the wounded soldiers in
Alive Day
committed suicide a few years later. Jim had kept in touch. The vet set up his computer to send out farewell notes after he’d died, and Jim was one of the recipients.

Gandolfini teamed up with Alpert for a second documentary, this time as executive producer and narrator, on the history of wartime post-traumatic stress,
Wartorn 1861–2010
, in 2011. Tom Richardson of Attaboy Films says they were preparing a documentary on American prisons when Gandolfini died, and talking about a documentary on for-profit prisons. Alpert, like Sirico, became a regular visitor at the Jersey Shore in the summer, and Gandolfini took a seat on the board of his New York City documentary company.

In all his work on the documentaries and for charity, Jim was pretty consistent about trying to fade into the background.

“I grew up not so different than Jim,” Al Giordano says. “I’m from Long Island. My dad was in the marines, I was in the marines, my brother went to West Point. Military service is in my family. I worked with Jim all these years, he was like a regular guy, you could talk with him about anything, he loved his Jets, Rutgers football, his son, his family, all of that, just like anybody. But I didn’t know until I read about it, after he’d died, that his father had gotten a Purple Heart in World War II. He never mentioned it. And that kind of makes it all come together for me. He was quiet about certain things.”

It’s a reminder of what T. J. Foderaro called his “bullshit meter”—the way Jim would be embarrassed by any mention of his own problems, or any note of sympathy you might offer him (even about Lynn Jacobson’s death). Gandolfini, Sirico, and Richardson—who’d met Buck twenty-five years earlier at the Rutgers pub—visited Iraq and Afghanistan together on U.S.O. tours. At first the U.S.O. put them up in a five-star hotel in Kuwait City, but Gandolfini wanted to see the war. They took off, first for a police station in Mosul, in Kurdistan, which had been taken back by American troops just the day before. They saw enough to make guys who play tough guys on TV respect the tough guys who were protecting them in the desert.

But they impressed everybody, even General Ray Odierno, a Jersey guy himself, who would later become commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. Giordano and the Wounded Warriors Project have decided to create an annual James Gandolfini Award, dedicated to the celebrity who does the most to support them in any year.

*   *   *

Gandolfini made two movies, too, in 2008, first David Chase’s semiautobiographical
Not Fade Away,
about a young Italian-American growing up in Newark in the 1960s in love with the Rolling Stones. Gandolfini plays the slightly mystified father, whose son throws caution to the winds and heads to California with his upscale Jersey girlfriend—who promptly leaves him behind at a Malibu party to run off with Mick Jagger.

And Gandolfini played a world-weary American general in the British satire of the political shenanigans leading up to the Iraq war,
In the Loop.
The movie did rather well, appearing just as the American presidential elections were gearing up and the consensus that the war had been a huge mistake had hardened into a wide conviction. Gandolfini’s is a supporting role, but one crucial to the plot, a U.S. general who knows the war will be a disaster but cynically comes out in support to help his career when he realizes Washington has already decided to go to war.